Dear Svitlana, dear Rector, dear family and friends, ladies and gentlemen,
It is my pleasure to welcome you to Svitlana Mayboroda's inaugural lecture and to introduce her to you.
Svitlana was born in the Eastern Ukrainean city of Kharkiv, at this time still part of Soviet Union and well known for its school in theoretical physics. She attended high school there and continued with studies in applied mathematics and in business finance. She earned two master degrees from the University of Kharkiv in 2001 holding already an offer for a PhD position at the University of Missouri in hands. There Svitlana completed her PhD on Poisson problems in Lipschitz domains in 2005 under the supervision of Marius Mitrea. Visiting positions brought her to the Australian National University, to Ohio State University and to Brown University before she joined Purdue in 2008 and the University of Minnesota in 2011.
Svitlana's area of research can be located at the interface between partial differential equations with a stochastic flavor, analysis, and geometric measure theory. Her deep theoretical work has remarkably wide ranging applications from condensed matter physics or cold atoms systems to the engineering of organic and non-organic semiconductor materials. She is, for instance, very well known for Landscape theory, e.g. a non-asymptotic version of the Weyl law. Weyl's law, which is named after Hermann Weyl who was professor at ETH Zurich about one hundred years ago, relates the spectrum of certain operators with the underlying geometries: "Can you hear the shape of a drum?" as Mark Kac coined it. Weyl's law has then been extended by Fefferman and Phong about 40 years ago. Landscape theory removes some shortcomings of the Fefferman-Phong approach. Landscape theory also had a big impact in, e.g., semiconductor engineering.
Svitlana has received many awards: the Alfred P Sloan Research Fellowship, the (inaugural) AWM-Sadosky Prize in Analysis, the US Blavatnik National Award, and the (inaugural) Stein Prize for New Perspectives in Analysis, just to name a few. She was an invited section speaker at the ICM 2018 in Rio de Janeiro and is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. And Svitlana is founder and Director of the Simons Collaboration on Localization of Waves. Simons Collaborations, financed by the Jim Simons' – another eminent mathematician and investor – foundation, bring together groups of the outstanding scientists to address topics of fundamental scientific importance in which a significant new development has created a novel area for exploration in an established field.
We are very happy that Svitlana Mayboroda has accepted our offer and joined the faculty of D-MATH at ETH Zurich as a full professor in 2023. We are looking forward to her inaugural lecture.